The Fruitful Facets of Gabon's Polyhedron 415
that he rejects with his own favored structuralism. This remarkable passage
encapsulates the tradition of argument by relative frequency in natural history.
Bateson acknowledges that natural selection occurs, of course, but relegates
Darwin's force to a periphery of unimportance as an arbiter among novelties
generated internally. Bateson manages, in this single passage, to attribute both
stability and variation to internal causes, and to brand selection as a secondary
tinkerer upon patterns established thereby:
We may ascribe the difference either to causes external to the organisms,
primarily, that is to say, to a difference in the exigencies of adaptation under
natural selection; or on the other hand, we may conceive the difference as due to
innate distinctions in the chemical and physiological constitutions of the fixed
and the variable respectively. There is truth undoubtedly in both conceptions. If
the mole were physiologically incapable of producing an albino, that variety
would not have come into being, and if the albino were totally incapable of
getting its living it would not be able to hold its own ... I incline to the view that
the variability of polymorphic forms should be regarded rather as a thing
tolerated than as an element contributing directly to their chances of life; and on
the other hand, that the fixity of the monomorphic forms should be looked upon
not so much as a proof that natural selection controls them with a greater
stringency, but rather as evidence of a natural and intrinsic stability of chemical
constitution (1913, p. 28).Bateson presents an even more striking contrast in later passages of the same
book, when he develops an image for a great, if undoable, thought experiment—
the perfectly controlled account of evolution under uniform conditions, unbuffeted
by any of the Darwinian externalities that make real results so untidy and
unpredictable: "No one disputes that the adaptation of organisms to their
surroundings is one of the great problems of nature, but it is not the primary
problem of descent. Moreover, until the normal and undisturbed course of descent
under uniform conditions is ascertained with some exactness, it is useless to
attempt a survey of the consequences of external interference" (1913, p. 187).
I am somehow stunned by this structuralist audacity in branding the
functionalist panoply as mere "external interference"—and of imagining a
formalist internal order so set and predictable that pathways of evolution might
become as regular and predictable as planetary orbits, if only we could remove all
these pesky environmental influences. The impetus and sine qua non of change for
Darwin becomes, for Bateson, a mere disturbance that sullies an otherwise lovely
experiment.
Hugo de Vries: A Most Reluctant Non-Darwinian
Dousing the great party of 1909
It must have been a grand show. Wallace and Hooker still lived, and happily
attended to present their memories and current views. Darwin's son Francis helped
with arrangements; while Sir George, his most academically accomplished